Recently I've been getting loads of spam messages on my Yahoo! messenger so I've taken down my Yahoo! messenger information from my TS profile. Has anyone else been suffering from such problems ?

ps. I'm not saying the spam messages are the fault TS but I took the info down anyways.

That's typical when email/IM identities get posted to public websites.
It's trivial to data farm a website for this IDs and then use them for any
nefarious purpose.

This was first seen in public News Groups (ie: the nttp protocol stuff).
If you have access to one, notice the signatures -- they (now) typically
show an email address that a person can figure out, but an email scanning program will miss, eg:

---
have a good day if at all possible.
J_O_NoSpam_Please@some_domain_._com
(remove NoSpam_Please and delete all '_')

Didou, I used to get AIM spam all the time. I took that information off TS a long time ago. It took about 3 months for it to take effect, but I just kept blocking everyone and eventually it stopped coming.

Didou, yes. I get about 1 a day on YIM. I've had AIM ICQ and YIM (I think) avaiable on TS for years. So while it may have gotten sniped from here, I'm still only getting 1 a day, which is FAR better than the spam emails I get to my primary address.

The YIM crap I get isn't even readable really, its just a mess of text, characters, and numbers. Maybe Yahoo's official client processes it differently? But Adium spits it out to me into some unreadable mess, I just close the window and move on.

It appears that vBulletin by default displays this info to guests as well as registered users. I have to agree it's not the smartest thing then to share your info freely if it can cause this kind of trouble.

I've noticed since New Year's. I've been getting a lot of spam in my gmail account for some reason! And I dont post my email address publicly.

As you long as you identify them as spam with the proper Gmail button, you should have less & less as the days go by.

I have a (very small) problem with spam on the email account which I use for this forum. The originators names are all wildly different, and I'm only registered on this site and maybe one other.
I can easily recognize the bogus senders, since I simply don't get much normal email. So for this no harm, no foul. My Verizon filters pick it right up and deposit it in the "bulk" folder almost 100 % on the time. I don't know if a deletion from the bulk folder automatically triggers a spam tag. (I know I should check).
My point here is, I'm sort of wondering, with all the different senders with (and without) bogus sounding senders, could these be coming from "Storm" worm victims? (Or another bot net)?

Just to clarify, the email you register with your TechSpot account is not visible to bots, unregistered or even registered members unless you expressly have turned on such option. Thus spam is not at all a consequence of registering here.

This discussion started over sharing IM details in your TechSpot account and its visibility to outsiders.

Yes, since the IM clients are readily shared in the User Profile, as well as on each individual post.

Edit: I don't see them anymore, Julio might have changed something, or I'm just blind

They seem to have been absent from post for a while, if I remember correctly?